CINEMATIC MONSTROSITIES, LITERARY MODERNISMS by MARTIN ROGERS (Under the Direction of JED RASULA) ABSTRACT In Cinematic Monstrosity, Literary Modernisms, I examine the horrific representations that result when the work of American literary modernisms intersect with monster movies and horror film. Monster and horror movies as literary representations function as emblems of the legacy of literary “high modernism” and the “shock” of the modernist intervention on the American literary corpus. This monstrous engagement is expressed as an ambivalent preoccupation with the traumas of modern war and the formal and conceptual symptoms of modernism, as well as a deployment of allusions to the syntax and semantics of the modern horror film. My central literary exhibits will be Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Thomas Pynchon, Brett Easton Ellis, and Don Delillo. These examples are joined together here primarily by their deployment of monster- and horror-movie technique, imagery, or context to stage various levels of commentary on form and on literary authorship as well as to rehearse and confront the psychic horror of modern warfare and the violence implied or promised by technological innovation. INDEX WORDS: Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Thomas Pynchon, Brett Easton Ellis, Don Delillo, horror film, monster movies, Psycho, Dracula [film], Frankenstein [film], White Zombie, James Whale, Tod Browning. CINEMATIC MONSTROSITIES, LITERARY MODERNISMS by MARTIN ROGERS A.B., Rowan Univeristy, 1998 M.A., University of Georgia, 2001 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2010 © 2010 Martin Rogers All Rights Reserved CINEMATIC MONSTROSITIES, LITERARY MODERNISMS by MARTIN ROGERS Major Professor: Jed Rasula Committee: Antje Ascheid Hugh Ruppersburg Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2010 iv DEDICATION I dedicate this work to my daughter, Wren Bramblett Rogers, in celebration of her joyous birth on 11 September 2010. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project would not have been possible without the guidance of my committee members, especially the thoughtful contributions of Jed Rasula. I am indebted to Robin Wharton for revision suggestions of an early draft of Chapter II, and I am grateful to Amy Bramblett for her tireless editorial work. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v LIST OF FIGURES ...................................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION.........................................................................................................1 II MONSTROUS MODERNISM...................................................................................20 FILMY BORDERS: THE DAY OF THE LOCUST...............................................27 BRIMMING WITH ABOMINATIONS: MODERNIST MONSTROSITY IN NIGHTWOOD........................................................................................................46 III THE POSTMODERN CREATURE-FEATURES OF THOMAS PYNCHON..........62 CREATURE-FEATURES: GRAVITY’S RAINBOW.............................................67 PYNCHON VS. GODZILLA..............................................................................104 IV VIDEO NASTIES AND THE MONSTROUS BODIES OF AMERICAN PSYCHO 135 V VIDEO HORROR AND DONDELILLO’S POINT OMEGA ..................................153 VI SOME CONCLUSIONS...........................................................................................178 WORKS CITED ..........................................................................................................................185 vii LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1: Dracula/Frankenstein double bill, 1937 ........................................................................22 Figure 2: White Zombie lobby poster.............................................................................................34 Figure 3: Cleopatra, the harpy .......................................................................................................54 Figure 4: The atomized Count Dracula of the Aurora company monster model kit .....................65 Figure 5: Disney’s atomic genie in Our Friend the Atom (1957)..................................................86 Figure 6: Karloff as Ardeth Bay in The Mummy (1932) ...............................................................91 Figure 7: “suggesting acts of sex more than death”.....................................................................110 Figure 8: Hedorah the Smog Monster..........................................................................................117 Figure 9: Douglas Gordon’s Monster (1996)...............................................................................164 Chapter I INTRODUCTION I propose that cinematic representations of monstrosity provide a crucial component to any understanding of literary modernism and the legacy of that modern intervention at work in contemporary American novels. In Cinematic Monstrosity, Literary Modernisms, I will examine the horrific representations that result when the work of American literary modernisms intersect with monster movies and horror film. I argue that monster and horror movies as literary representations function as emblems of the legacy of literary “high modernism,” and that they come to embody not only the “shock” of the modernist intervention on the American literary corpus but also the “crisis of representation” at the center of that intervention. This monstrous engagement is expressed as an ambivalent preoccupation with the traumas of modern war and the formal and conceptual symptoms of modernism, as well as a deployment of allusions to the syntax and semantics of the modern horror film. The word shock might here act as a conceptual or emotional link between art-horror like Nosferatu and the various visual and literary modernisms (and its post-war iterations via postmodernism et cetera); if the former exists as aesthetic reactions to (or enactments of) the “shock of the new,” the latter is more simply calibrated to “shock” its audiences. 2 The monstrous is a concept rooted in the body, and has served a variety of social ends: establishing, through an oppositional figure, embodied national and cultural identity; expressing both the desire for and the repercussions of social taboo; dramatizing (or rehearsing) contact with the forbidden and the unknown; and exaggerating the ambient fears and repressed neuroses of a people in a form which allows those repressions to be safely acknowledged. Because the monster is a body-thing, it will be observed at work in the text in one of two ways: as a figure in the text, be it allegorical, allusive, or an actual agent of the plot, and as an expression of the formal properties of the text itself—that is, as a characteristic of the “body” of the text in question. My central literary exhibits will be Nathanael West, Djuna Barnes, Thomas Pynchon, Brett Easton Ellis, and Don DeLillo. These examples are joined together here primarily by their deployment of monster- and horror-movie technique, imagery, or context to stage various levels of commentary on form and on literary authorship as well as to rehearse and confront the psychic horror of modern warfare and the violence implied or promised by technological innovation. However, I would argue that they share other traits more loosely, and that a kind of generic pattern can emerge that I will hereafterlabel a monstrous novel. This project thus includes American reactions to the “High Modernisms” of the 1910s and 1920s (via West, Barnes), those contemporary novelists whose work so often marks the temporal or literary event wherein the break between modern and postmodern can be identified (Pynchon) or who nevertheless “regress” into the aesthetico-ideological agenda of the late moderns via what David Foster Wallace has called “hyperrealism” (Ellis, DeLillo): as Frederic Jameson puts it, postmodernity is “unable to divest itself of the supreme value of innovation…. the new fetish of Difference continues to overlap the older one of the New, even if the two are not altogether coterminous” (Jameson, A Singular Modernity 55). So we will shorthand the 3 above mentioned authors of this-or-that literary movement as simply one of many “modernisms” since the First World War. The 1920s and 1930s whence we begin all of this modernism-ing was the same time period that saw the development and institutionalization of monster pictures as a form or as a genre. Between the world wars, the monster, creature, or (to some purists) horror film emerged in its so-called Golden Age with films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), Frankenstein (1932), and Dracula (1936). The rise of filmic horror then can be attributed to the need for a new artistic form to express the new ways of being-in-the-world that this period of history introduced.1 Jameson is useful again here: “Political and social experience both enable and limit scientific research and invention, rather than the other way round, as most intellectual histories presuppose. A new form must first emerge in the concrete realm of social relations before it can be transferred to more specialized domains of productive and intellectual life” (Jameson, Archaeologies 105). The subsequent fluctuations and mutations